Sundance Film Festival — star turns for Emma Thompson, John Boyega and Sigourney Weaver

This year’s Sundance Film Festival was all set to go ahead with its first in-person screenings since 2020 — until the Omicron variant of coronavirus arrived, forcing it all back online again with just three weeks to go.

The fallout could have been more smoothly handled; all ticket bookings were cancelled and the entire schedule overhauled, leading to an uncharacteristic sense of chaos when the festival finally started. Surprisingly, there was only one actual casualty: a French remake of the cult 2017 Japanese zombie movie One Cut of the Dead directed by Michel Hazanavicius of The Artist fame.

Opening night was a mixed bag. The festival’s tendency to start with a handful of titles instead of one big opener can pay off — as it did in 2014 with Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash.

This year, however, one of the first out of the gate was the deeply mediocre When You Finish Saving the World. The writing and directing debut of actor Jesse Eisenberg, it completely wastes the promising pairing of Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things. Moore plays Evelyn, a leftwing mom frustrated by her shallow son Ziggy’s obsession with becoming a YouTube music sensation. Both are victims of their own self-absorption: she becomes over-attached to a family staying in the women’s refuge that she runs, while he fakes an interest in politics to impress a girl at school. It plays like a Saturday Night Live parody of the kind of worthy American indie film in which common ground is always eventually found, and it couldn’t have been more underwhelming.

Things soon began to pick up with two examples of the zeitgeist-savvy movies that Sundance is best known for — ones that the major studios are no longer financially motivated to make. Emergency is a twist on the college caper genre: two black friends and their Hispanic roommate have a night to remember after finding a strange white girl passed out in their frat house. The central joke is that they can’t just go to the cops because of their race — a detail initially played for laughs as they try to figure out what to do with the girl, but director Carey Williams commits fully to the conceit. With likeable leads and sharp banter, the film hits some serious dramatic beats in its final stretch, ending with a surprising gut punch.

If Emergency is a calling card, 892 is a full-blown arrival, an intimate truth-based thriller that shows just how good an actor John Boyega can be, given the right material. He plays Brian Brown-Easley, an ex-Marine who walks into an Atlanta bank and holds the staff hostage with a bomb. The bank manager offers him thousands, but Brown-Easley only wants the $892 that the government owes him after cancelling his welfare cheque on a technicality.

It’s a tricky part to play — Brown-Easley is gentle and polite yet frightening and clearly displays mental health issues. Adding extra poignancy to a story that becomes unexpectedly moving is the casting of the late Michael K Williams as hostage negotiator Eli, who tries to talk sense to Brown-Easley while knowing first-hand how shabbily the US government sometimes treats its veterans.

A heartening development at this year’s festival is the way movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter have become part of the fabric of such films, and not the focus. A good example is Phyllis Nagy’s Call Jane, a late 1960s-set period drama that stars Elizabeth Banks as Joy, a pregnant housewife with a condition that could kill her if she reaches full term. Refused a termination, she goes underground with a loose collection of feminists who arrange the procedure as a not-for-profit service. Nagy shoots in a breezy, sunlit style, with a fantastic period soundtrack and a scene-stealing performance by Sigourney Weaver as the leader of the anonymised Janes.

Similarly, Amy Berg’s Phoenix Rising is more than just your average doc of the week. Telling the story so far of 34-year-old actress Evan Rachel Wood, it explains how a girl from North Carolina ended up in an allegedly abusive relationship with Marilyn Manson.

Rather than throw the shock-rocker straight under the bus (that comes later), Berg builds up a picture of Wood’s turbulent family background, followed by a film career in which she was instantly sexualised at a young age (significantly, two of the films cited — 2003’s Thirteen and 2005’s Pretty Persuasion — premiered at Sundance). But when it all begins to seem like so much dirty laundry, Berg widens the focus to highlight Wood’s work as an advocate for survivors of domestic abuse, seeking to extend the statute of limitations on such crimes from three years to 10. Manson refutes the allegations.

There were plenty of good roles for women, notably Emily the Criminal, which stars Aubrey Plaza as a college graduate who, crippled by debt, turns to credit-card fraud to pay off her student loans. Plaza has a history of quirky comedies, but this slick, snappily written LA noir shows a previously unseen no-nonsense side to her: it could prove to be the breakout film of the festival.

Dystopian black comedy Dual, meanwhile, had Karen Gillan in two good roles, playing a dying woman who pays to have herself duplicated, sees her clone take over her life, and then finds out she’s not dying after all. And, on paper, Emma Thompson looked to have the best role of the festival, playing a sixtysomething widow who hires a young male escort in Good Luck To You, Leo Grande. Though she delivers a typically self-effacing performance (“I feel like Rolf Harris,” she gasps in a fit of self-loathing), the material is stagey and very earnest.

It would have made a good double bill with Living, a 1950s-set drama that stars her fellow British national treasure Bill Nighy as Mr Williams, a stiff-upper-lipped civil servant who gets some bad news from his doctor and starts bunking off from the office. Like Thompson’s character, he is widowed and deeply lonely, refusing to tell his son and daughter-in-law and finding comfort instead in a string of strangers — a drinking pal, a waitress, and finally a group of mothers trying to get planning permission for a kids’ playground. A remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru, the script is by no less than Kazuo Ishiguro, but the strict social codes of postwar Japan suit the story far better than the merely stuffy London seen here.

An unexpected upsurge in violence came with the cannibal-dating horror Fresh and the fantastically grim psycho-thriller Speak No Evil, which explores the dangers of befriending Dutch people on holiday . . . 

But one of the best films of the festival was the gentlest, a wonderful low-fi British comedy called Brian and Charles. Set in north Wales and shot in an unobtrusive mock-doc style, it stars David Earl as Brian, an eccentric inventor of useless objects, the latest being a robot made from a washing machine and some pieces of scrap. When it comes to life during a thunderstorm, Brian finds a new friend, forming the basis of a lovely Wallace & Gromit-style buddy movie about friendship and connection that would have been great to see with a cinema audience — if only Omicron had allowed.

To January 30, festival.sundance.org